• The asteroid 'Oumuamua was discovered in October 2017.
• Its weird shape makes some scientists think it's not a natural object.
• On Wednesday, scientists began listening for complex radio signals coming from the asteroid and will likely announce their findings sometime soon.
• It’s highly unlikely 'Oumuamua is a sign aliens exist, but it should be interesting to learn more about the object nonetheless.

Are intelligent extraterrestrials trying to communicate with or study us? Some scientists think that’s a possibility—and that it’s happening right now.

Starting at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative began pointing a powerful radio telescope toward a mysterious object visiting the solar system hopeful they could detect signs that the interstellar interloper is actually of alien origin.

The object in question is ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid from another star system currently zipping past Jupiter at about 196,000 miles per hour, too fast to be trapped by the sun’s gravitational pull.

First discovered in mid-October by astronomers at the Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii, the 800-meter-long, 80-meter-wide, cigar-shaped rock is, technically speaking, weird as hell—and that’s precisely why some scientists think it’s not a natural object.

If you’ve spent time learning about UFOs, then you might already know that most experts who believe interstellar travel is possible posit that such a ship would probably be shaped like a cigar or needle, because it would be lean and aerodynamic enough to minimize friction and slim the chances of colliding with another object or harmful gas and dust.

Especially given how solid it looks and how fast it’s going, ‘Oumuamua, which means scout or messenger in Hawaiian, is really unlike anything else. With the asteroid making a fast exit from our solar system, scientists are eager to figure out whether the bugger might actually be an alien spacecraft—maybe a vessel for living beings, maybe a robotic probe, maybe something else entirely—however unlikely that might be.

Breakthrough Initiatives, launched by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to study the galaxy for signs of extraterrestrials, is most famous for its Stephen Hawking–backed Starshot project to send cheap spacecraft to Alpha Centauri at one-fifth the speed of light to find signs of habitability or alien life.

Its more conventional SETI sister project, Listen, uses radio telescopes to scan space and listen for complex radio signals that might be signs of an alien civilization.

For 10 hours on Wednesday, Breakthrough Listen will point the Green Bank Telescope, based in West Virginia, at ‘Oumuamua and listen for anything unusual emanating from the object that doesn’t have a conventional explanation.

The Green Bank Telescope could detect signals on the scale of a mobile phone coming from ‘Oumuamua, Milner tells Scientific American.

Even if there’s no signal coming from ‘Oumuamua, the Green Bank observations can still collect valuable insight on whether the asteroid possesses water or ice or exhibits any strange chemistry.

There’s no exact timetable for when Breakthrough Listen will announce its findings, but it should be sooner rather than later.

It’s highly unlikely ‘Oumuamua is a sign aliens exist, but even skeptics will have to admit there’s rarely been a better object to pin our ET hopes on than this bizarre-looking rock.

Neel V. Patel is a science and tech writer from Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Inverse, Wired, Popular Science, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

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• Astronomers recently detected a strange, cigar-shaped object passing through the solar system.
• Called 'Oumuamua, it appears to be a metal-rich asteroid that comes from another star system.
• Just in case alien transponders are on the surface, a project called Breakthrough Listen is using a radio telescope to scan it for extraterrestrial signals.
• So far no signal has been found, but more observations are planned and it could take awhile to analyze all of the data.

Astronomers have trained powerful radio telescopes on 'Oumuamua, one of the more bizarre objects ever detected flying through the solar system.

Initially thought to be a comet but later identified as an asteroid, 'Oumuamua (which means "scout" in Hawaiian) is a cigar-shaped, 750-by-115-foot object that recently zipped around the sun and is moving too fast to get captured by the star's gravity. Based on 'Oumuamua's unusually hyperbolic path through space, astronomers say it's perhaps the first interstellar object ever detected — in short, a space rock from a distant star system.

Breakthrough Listen, a non-profit research organization that bills itself as "scientific program in search for evidence of technological life in the Universe," is now scanning 'Oumuamua for possible radio or other wireless signals.

No one really expects to hear such tell-tale signs of intelligent alien life, but the organization says 'Oumuamua is good practice for if and when another foreign object zips through our cosmic neighborhood.

"‘Oumuamua's presence within our solar system affords Breakthrough Listen an opportunity to reach unprecedented sensitivities to possible artificial transmitters and demonstrate our ability to track nearby, fast-moving objects," Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley SETI Research Center and a Breakthrough Listen member, said in a press release. "Whether this object turns out to be artificial or natural, it's a great target for [Breakthrough] Listen."

A big yet brief interstellar voyager

Researchers discovered 'Oumuamua on October 18.

After further telescope observations, astronomers described it as an unusually oblong asteroid with dense, metal-rich rock. It also has a dark-red sheen — a color it earned from billions of years of cosmic rays corroding organic molecules on its surface — and, while it zips through the solar system at more than 16 miles per second, is tumbling wildly, rather than rotating smoothly.

Breakthrough Listen began a first round of observations with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia at 'Oumuamua on Wednesday afternoon. (The device "listens" in radiowaves, so observations at night aren't required.)

During the first pass, the Green Bank Telescope aimed its antennas at 'Oumuamua and listened to billions of wireless radio channels for two hours. According to Breakthrough Listen, this observation recorded a whopping 90 terabytes of raw data — enough to fill up 23 new top-of-the-line iMac Pro computers.

"So far, no signal was detected," Avi Loeb, a physicist at Harvard University and a member of Breakthrough Listen's leadership, told Business Insider on Thursday.

But all that data is still being processed by supercomputers to weed out Earth-based signals and hunt for probable alien signals. What's more, this covered only one side of 'Oumuamua — so the group has planned three more radio observations before the strange object leaves our solar system for good.

"During follow-up observations the coming week, we will do 3 more passes with each receiver to cover other phases of Oumumua's [sic] rotation," Siemion wrote in an email that Loeb forwarded to Business Insider.

As for that strange cigar shape, Loeb suspects there is a simple yet surprising explanation, though he emphasized his lack of a definitive answer.

"I am currently working on ideas for how to form a highly elongated shape for a rock through a natural process," Loeb said. "One path is through spin of molten rock droplets (lava) that form in collision of rocky planets (similar to the collision that produced the moon out of the Earth). Another is through instabilities in dust forming environments."

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• An asteroid called 2002 AJ129 will pass within about 2.6 million miles of Earth on February 4.
• The space rock may be 1,000 feet taller than the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.
• Astronomers are taking radar images of the "potentially hazardous" asteroid, though NASA says it has "zero" chance of hitting Earth within the next 100 years.
• Giant telescopes are being built to find similarly sized "city killer" asteroids that threaten our planet.

Astronomers are keeping a close eye on a big space rock that will fly past Earth in just a few weeks.

Dubbed asteroid 2002 AJ129, the rock is at least 1,000 feet wide and, according to experts contacted by Time, about 3,700 feet long. That exceeds the height of the 2,717-foot-tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the tallest building in the world.

But these estimates are suspect, which is why planetary defense experts want to get more data.

"I don't think much is known about this object," Patrick Taylor, an astronomer and planetary radar expert at Arecibo Observatory, told Business Insider in an email.

Taylor and others who work with Arecibo — a huge radio dish built inside of a Puerto Rican sinkhole — plan to ping the mysterious space rock with radar, then record the echoes that bounce back to produce high-resolution images.

"The Arecibo radar will give us a much better understanding of its size, shape, and rotation by directly measuring all three properties," Taylor said.

The asteroid will fly closest to Earth during its current orbit on Monday, February 4, at around 4:30 p.m. ET, according to a press release by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA considers the space rock "potentially hazardous" because it flies within about 4.6 million miles of our planet. On February 4, however, it will pass within about 2.6 millions miles of Earth. During future trips, it could edge as close as 500,000 miles, or roughly twice the Earth-moon distance.

Yet Earth should be safe from 2002 AJ129 for a very long time.

"We have been tracking this asteroid for over 14 years and know its orbit very accurately," Paul Chodas, an astronomer who manages NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, said in the release. "Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance — zero — of colliding with Earth on Feb. 4 or any time over the next 100 years."

How to photograph a potentially hazardous asteroid

Arecibo and other radar observatories, including the Goldstone Radio Telescope, regularly ping passing space rocks like 2002 AJ129.

"We plan observations for dozens of asteroids per year, a subset of which can be found on our webpage," Taylor said, referring to Arecibo's planetary science radar group page.

The images produced by these observation campaigns are often incredible.

Take asteroid 2014 JO25, for example. Arecibo pinged the 2,000-foot-long, peanut-shaped object with active radar during its close approach in April 2017 and recorded the echoes:

Arecibo strung the photos together into animations (which Business Insider featured as some of the best space and astronomy images of 2017).

This clip shows the asteroid tumbling in space about 1.1 million miles from Earth:

Saving Earth from killer asteroids

Although asteroid 2002 AJ129 does not pose an immediate threat, observing such objects in detail is critical to the mission of defending Earth from dangerous space rocks.

"Arecibo goes beyond acting as a fortune teller, we can characterize these objects,"Ed Rivera-Valentín, a planetary scientist with the Universities Space Research Association who studies Arecibo data, previously told Business Insider. "We can study their size, shape, spin state, composition, and near-surface geology."

The ultimate goal is to feed such data into advanced simulations and estimate how big a threat a particular space rock poses to humanity.

"An asteroid impact, unlike other natural catastrophes, can actually be avoided. The data from Arecibo can be used by NASA to inform a planetary defense mission," Rivera-Valentín said.

A "planetary defense" mission may sound like the plot of a science fiction blockbuster, but NASA is serious about tracking and preparing for killer asteroids. The space agency even has a mandate from Congress to find 90% of an estimated 300,000 near-Earth objects big enough to wipe a large city off the map.

Space rocks that are capable of such devastation pass by us with worrisomefrequency. In fact, the typical American is about 30 times more likely to die from a regional asteroid strike during their lifetime than a terrorist attack committed by a refugee.

But NASA recently and for a third time chose not to fully fund a mission called NEOCam: a proposal for a powerful asteroid-hunting space telescope that could help get the job done.

Fortunately, ground-based observatories like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) are being built and tested. As they go online in the coming years, such technology could help find killer asteroids drifting through the void.

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NOW WATCH: There's a place at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where hundreds of giant spacecraft go to die

When astronaut Jim Lovell saw Earth outside his window during Apollo 8, the moment forever changed him.

"People often say, 'I hope to go to heaven when I die,'" Lovell previously told Business Insider. "In reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you're born."

Lovell was referring to the humbling truth about our fragile existence: Life exists here only because it teeters in a delicate and truly improbable balance. Our atmosphere, proximity to the sun, and countless other beautiful coincidences not only permit living things to survive and evolve, but also to thrive.

And yet, here we are, sitting at desks and in coffee shops and walking down the street like it isn't some kind of extraordinary miracle.

But all good things must come to an end.

One day Earth will be inhospitable to anything resembling life as we know it.

The life on this planet likely won't cease until billions of years from now. But, depending on how the stars align — in some cases, literally — it could also happen tomorrow or anytime in between.

Here are the many ways scientists believe the Earth as we know it could die.

This story was originally published on March 30, 2016 at 8:55 a.m. ET and updated with new information.

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1) The Earth's molten core might cool.

Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic shield, called the magnetosphere.

The field is generated by Earth's rotation, which swirls a thick shell of liquid iron and nickel (the outer core) around a solid ball of metal (the inner core), creating a giant electric dynamo.

• A meteorite that fell to Earth in October 2008 contained scores of small diamonds.
• The diamonds and the impurities found in them suggest the rock came from inside a planet.
• Scientists think the planet was destroyed 4.5 billion years ago and was the size of Mercury or even Mars.
• Asteroid TC₃, as it's called, may be the first pristine chunk of a "lost" planet ever recovered on Earth.

After a 4.5-billion-year journey through space, a car-size rock fell to Earth on October 7, 2008. The stony meteorite, called asteroid 2008 TC₃, plunged through the atmosphere and exploded, and pieces rained on the Nubian Desert in Africa.

Meteorite hunters recovered about 50 fragments, which researchers later named the Almahata Sitta collection after a nearby train station in Sudan.

But while many stony meteorites hail from Mars, these were peculiar. They contained a bunch of tiny diamonds.

Scientists now think those gems and the impurities found inside them could come only from the heart of a planet the size of Mercury or perhaps Mars. That would mean the rock that fell to Earth nearly a decade ago was part of a "lost" planet formed — and destroyed— at the dawn of the solar system.

"This is the first compelling evidence for such a large body that has since disappeared," said the authors of a new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

If the authors are correct, the rocks could be the first pristine samples — or ureilites — of a dead planetary embryo ever recovered on Earth.

Why scientists think they've found part of a destroyed planet

The diamonds we're familiar with are formed when sheets of carbon called graphite — the same material in pencil lead — are squeezed to incredible pressures. (Lately, however, engineers have been making diamonds out of dead bodies.)

Inside Earth, they're made when carbon-rich magma more than 100 miles below the crust pipes upward and cools in a lava tube. The pressures found about a mile deep cause the carbon to crystallize into diamonds.

But diamonds can form much deeper inside a planet, and they're rarely pure.

"Diamonds very often encapsulate and trap minerals and melts present in their formation environment, in the form of inclusions," or impurities, said the authors of the study, which was led by researchers at the Earth and Planetary Science Laboratory in Switzerland.

"In terrestrial diamonds, this has allowed [us] to estimate the depth of diamond formation, and to identify the composition and petrology of phases sampled at that depth," they added.

Using those tools, the researchers said, they could discover the conditions under which the diamonds inside the 2008 asteroid might have formed.

The scientists cut up a sample of the rock and analyzed it with a battery of electron-microscope technologies.

The images revealed inclusions of sulfur, iron, and a mineral called chromite, as well as warping of the diamond crystal and nearby graphite.

According to the researchers, this means the diamonds formed at the extreme pressure of 20 gigapascals, about 180 times as crushing as the pressure found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in Earth's oceans. Because of that, they concluded the diamonds most likely formed in an environment found only inside rocky planets.

Specifically, the researchers think a rocky protoplanet "embryo" at least 4,800 miles wide that formed roughly 10 million years into the solar system's formation made the diamonds found in the asteroid.

"Many planetary formation models have predicted that these planetary embryos existed in the first million years of our solar system, and the study offers compelling evidence for their existence," said a press release from the Earth and Planetary Science Laboratory.

The planetary embryos got ejected from the solar system and either became rogue planets or smashed together. Some collisions formed larger worlds, while others created systems of planets and satellites like the Earth and its moon.

The mystery planet doesn't have a name, but the researchers said it was "lost" when it was "destroyed by collisions some 4.5 billion years ago."

NASA will soon visit the metal core of a dead world

Scientists aren't waiting around for more pieces of dead planets to rain on Earth — they're planning to fly out and meet one.

A mission recently selected by NASA called Psyche is expected to launch a spacecraft to the metallic core of an asteroid in 2022.

It's called 16 Psyche, which Jim Green, NASA's chief scientist, has described as "a very large and rare" asteroid in the asteroid belt.

It's about 155 miles wide and thought to be made of pure nickel and covered in ice.

The Psyche probe is set to visit the dead planet and analyze its secrets.

"These missions will help us learn about the infancy of our solar system, a period just 10 million years after the birth of our sun," Green said of Psyche and another mission called Lucy in a NASA video last year.

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• Ceres is a Texas-size dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt that may hide a salty ocean.
• NASA's ion-propelled Dawn probe reached Ceres in 2015 — the first visit to the mysterious world.
• Now NASA is now thrusting Dawn 10 times closer to Ceres than ever before, which will allow the probe to take new photos and measurements.
• Dawn's mission manager says it will be a "daring adventure" due to all of the things that could go wrong.

Lurking between Mars and Jupiter is dwarf planet Ceres: a Texas-size world with an ice volcano, shiny salt deposits, and other features that suggest it hides a giant ocean.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has orbited the 592-mile-wide ice ball for years, but the probe is about to get its closest look at Ceres, the space agency said on Thursday.

Dawn began orbiting Ceres in March 2015. On Thursday, engineers at NASA mission control flipped on Dawn's ion engines for a week-long maneuver. The engines' gentle thrust will slowly descend Dawn into an oval-shaped orbit around Ceres, bringing it 10 times closer than ever before.

"Hold on, I'm going low!" the spacecraft's Twitter account said on Thursday.

Just how low? "An incredibly low 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the exotic terrain of ice, rock and salt," Marc Rayman, Dawn's mission manager and chief engineer, wrote in a recent blog post at Dawn Journal.

"The last time it was that close to a solar system body was when it rode a rocket from Cape Canaveral over the Atlantic Ocean more than a decade ago," Rayman said.

NASA expects Dawn to begin its closest-ever orbits starting June 7, and new images and other data should begin arriving shortly afterward.

Why Dawn is going on a 'daring adventure'

Dawn launched in September 2007. When it arrived at Ceres three years ago, it kept its distance to map the dwarf planet — a place in the solar system that no space mission had ever visited.

NASA has since gradually slipped Dawn closer and closer, though these maneuvers have become increasingly risky for the aging spacecraft to pull off.

The most recent maneuver brought Dawn within 300 miles of Ceres' icy surface between April and May, providing unprecedented views and measurements of the world.

But Rayman said the newest orbit that NASA is attempting, called "XM07," will help scientists get the closest-ever views of the most mysterious regions of Ceres. That includes the Occator Crater — a huge impact site that's littered with shiny salt deposits that may be evidence of a subsurface saltwater ocean.

"Attempting to repeatedly fly low over that geological unit presents daunting obstacles," Rayman wrote in his blog post. "It may not work, but the team will try. That's part of what makes for a daring adventure!"

One problem is that Dawn's gyroscope-like reaction control wheels, which help stabilize the spacecraft during maneuvers, stopped working in mid-2017.

Relatedly, "Ceres is not uniform inside," Rayman said. This causes the dwarf planet's gravity field to be uneven — an effect that could pull Dawn off-course over time and cause the probe to miss its flybys of Occator Crater and other targets.

"When Dawn swoops down much lower, our gravity map will not be accurate enough to predict all the subtle details of the mass distribution that may cause slightly larger or slightly smaller pulls at some locations," Rayman said. "It will take quite a while to formulate the new gravity map."

Rayman added that there's an upside to that risk, though: "That new map may reveal more about what's underground."

In particular, the spacecraft's radiation-sensing instrument might provide more details about the dwarf planet's icy crust, and perhaps even an ocean it hides below.

There is, however, also a risk that Dawn could crash into Ceres, which would deeply displease NASA's planetary protection officer.

What Dawn's closest-ever photos of Ceres may show

New images of the 57-mile-wide Occator Crater will be "amazing sights" that could help unravel some of Ceres' deepest mysteries, Rayman said. The photos will capture regions as small as 2 miles wide.

But he added that it's going to be extremely challenging to take those photos.

"Dawn is much, much, much too far away for controllers to point its camera and other instruments as you might with a joystick or other controller in real time," Rayman said.

At Dawn's lowest pass — roughly 115,000 feet above Ceres — the probe will be traveling more than 1,000 mph. Because Dawn is 250 million miles from our planet, it takes radio signals (which travel at light-speed) more than 22 minutes to get there, and an equal amount of time is needed for a response from Dawn to come back.

Since the stakes are incredibly high, Rayman said Dawn scientists used "thousands and thousands of hours of computer calculations" to try to nail the orbit. "If the probe arrived at Occator's latitude a mere 20 seconds off schedule, a spot on the ground that was expected to be in the center of the camera would have moved entirely out of view and so would not even be glimpsed," he said.

The maneuver will likely be the 11-year-old probe's last productive run. Without functional reaction wheels and given its limited propellant, NASA will eventually use the last bit of fuel to maroon Dawn into a stable and hopefully permanent orbit.

"Because of [a] commitment to protect Ceres from Earthly contamination, Dawn will not land or crash into Ceres," NASA said in an October 2017 statement. "Instead, it will carry out as much science as it can in its final planned orbit, where it will stay even after it can no longer communicate with Earth. Mission planners estimate the spacecraft can continue operating until the second half of 2018."

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• NASA wants to find killer asteroids before they smack into the planet.
• There are over a million potentially city-killing asteroids lurking beyond the edges of our sensory equipment, and we've only identified about a third of them.
• Asteroids just 140 meters, or around 450 feet across, can explode with the force of multiple nuclear bombs.

The threat of an "Armageddon-like" asteroid colliding into Earth is more real than you might think. 

Though an Earth-destroying asteroid of the size that a crack team led by Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck destroyed with a nuclear bomb is statistically improbable, NASA is taking the threat of smaller, near-Earth Objects (NEOs) seriously.

According to a new report the agency released earlier this month — which is based on a 2016 report— NASA is seeking to coordinate a strategy across a number of federal agencies to locate, track, and destroy asteroids that may pose a threat to Earth. It's a mission handed to the space agency from Congress, which passed a law in 2005 charging NASA with finding potentially hazardous NEOs. 

"If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers," Lindley Johnson, NASA's aptly-named Planetary Defense Officer, said in a press briefing.

NASA is focused on finding asteroids that are larger than 450 feet across, otherwise known as city-killers.

We're basically sitting on a moving target for these space rocks.

Asteroids of this size are difficult to detect, though they can pack a serious punch: if they smash into the Earth, or even enter our atmosphere, they can explode with the energy of least 60 megatons-worth of TNT — more powerful than the strongest nuclear weapon ever detonated.

"You do that over a city, and it's a very, very bad day," Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute previously told Business Insider. 

Scientists estimate that there are over a million of these city-destroyers lurking just beyond the edges of our sensing capabilities — and we've only discovered about a third of them.

Smaller asteroids can pose a threat, too. Take the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. The 65-foot asteroid — which no space agency detected before it entered the atmosphere, because of its small size — caused broken windows and a number of injuries. 

In 1908, a 150-foot asteroid wiped out an area roughly the size of New York City over Tunguska, Russia with a force equivalent to a nuclear bomb. If that asteroid hit a major city, it could potentially cause millions of casualties.

One of the ways scientists want to find these asteroids is with the proposed Near-Earth Object Camera, or NEOCam, which is a space-based telescope that would find hazardous asteroids using an infrared camera. 

NASA committed to funding the NEOCam last year, but its future is uncertain, as the technology remains in an "extended study phase," according to SpaceNews. 

We need to find these asteroids before it's too late. An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty — between 200 and 400 feet across — narrowly missed Earth in May, the largest asteroid to come that close to our planet in hundreds of years. 

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• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Democrat, defeated incumbent Joseph Crowley in a New York primary race on Tuesday.
• The House of Representatives nominee happens to have a space rock named after her: asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.
• MIT Lincoln Laboratory named the asteroid after Ocasio-Cortez, while in high school, won second place in a global science fair.
• The asteroid is about 1.44 miles wide, 240 million miles from Earth, and takes nearly 4 years to orbit the sun.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist born and raised in the Bronx, defeated longtime incumbent Joseph Crowley in a primary race for New York's 14th District on Tuesday.

As 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez begins her meteoric rise in politics — this November, she's highly likely to become the youngest woman ever elected to the US House of Representatives — observers have pointed out that she has an asteroid named after her, called 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.

The Democratic politician confirmed this fact in early June.

"It's true! Science was my first passion," she tweeted on June 12, adding that the asteroid was named in honor of longevity experiments she conducted out of Mt. Sinai Health System in New York.

"My research won 2nd place globally in Microbiology at @intel ISEF," she said in the tweet, referring to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. "At [Boston University] I started as science major, changed to Econ 🤓#nerdalert"

How Ocasio-Cortez got a space rock named after her

The asteroid in question was discovered on November 20, 2000, by the Lincoln Observatory Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Not anyone can officially name an asteroid: That duty belongs International Astronomical Union, the world's official record-keeper of celestial objects. According to IAU rules, the person or people who discover an asteroid get 10 years to suggest a name.

Jenifer Evans, an electrical engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was one of the lead scientists on LINEAR along with her boss Grant Stokes — so they had the naming rights to all the asteroids the program found. LINEAR, built in 1996, uses ground-based telescopes at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to scan for asteroids and comets — especially any that may pose a threat to our planet. It was one of the first high-power surveys of the night sky, so it discovered more than 140,000 asteroids.

Evans and Stokes decided to keep things "honorable" by handing out asteroid names to the winners of top science and engineering fairs for students.

"We didn't want to make it willy-nilly. We wanted to keep it exclusive," Evans told Business Insider. She said first- and second-place winners of three major student competitions, plus some teachers and mentors, get naming rights.

"Usually science people aren't in the newspaper," Evans said. "This is a way to encourage an interest in science because local newspapers will write up, 'Tommy Smith had an asteroid after him.' It's almost as cool as, 'Tommy Smith made three touchdowns at the football game.'"

This is where Ocasio-Cortez comes in.

When she submitted her high-school microbiology project in 2007 and won second place at Intel's science and engineering fair, she automatically won the naming rights to an asteroid found by LINEAR.

From there, Evans worked with the IAU to propose the name "23238 Ocasio-Cortez" and ask its 13-member judging panel to approve the title. The name passed in August 2007, affixing Ocasio-Cortez's name to a space rock.

About 15,000 asteroids have been named after people, and Ocasio-Cortez was far from the first student — the naming program has been going since 2001.

Today, about 4,000 middle- and high-school students have had asteroids named after them, which represents nearly a fifth of all named space rocks.

What we know about asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez

Not too much is known about asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez, since no spacecraft has ever visited it for an up-close look.

"We have no idea what any of these are. We only see it as a bright spot," Evans said, adding that it's only visible through a telescope and not with a naked eye. "And you can't tell the difference between a star and an asteroid at first. It looks like a star until it moves from one picture to the next."

However, observations by LINEAR and other telescopes have pinned down some basic pieces of knowledge about the rock, which NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has logged in an expansive database of asteroids.

Asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez is about 1.44 miles wide and an average of 240 million miles from Earth. This puts it in the Asteroid Belt, which is an expansive zone between Mars and Jupiter.

Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute, says the rock appears to be what's called a "QV" type asteroid.

"These guys were blasted off the surface of Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, from the impact of another asteroid at its south pole," Sykes, who works on the Dawn mission (which visited Vesta), told Business Insider. "So her asteroid could be a piece of Vesta."

It takes the space rock about 3 years, 10 months, 9 days, and 18 hours to make one trip around the sun. During that trip, which is slightly oval-shaped, 23238 Ocasio-Cortez travels slightly above the plane of the solar system for about half the time, and dips below it the other half. It's a very stable orbit, so the asteroid is unlikely to doom Earth.

"It'll never get close to the Earth, and it'll always be beyond Mars. Unless something weird happens," Sykes said.

Evans said naming "safe" asteroids after students was very deliberate.

"We want to assure all the students that their asteroid will never impact Earth," Evans said.

Although it's a pretty typical space rock, Evans said few people get anything named after them — let alone a 4.5-billion-year-old object that's likely to outlast the human race by billions if not trillions of years.

This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published on June 28, 2018.

SEE ALSO: A diamond-encrusted meteorite that fell to Earth may come from a long-lost planet in our solar system

DON'T MISS: City-killing asteroids will inevitably strike Earth — but NASA isn't launching this mission to hunt them down

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NOW WATCH: Astronomers have discovered a bizarre-looking object that came from outside our solar system

Scientists who study asteroids often say that Earth is drifting through a cosmic shooting gallery.

Some angry space rocks, like the recent Chelyabinsk meteorite that exploded over Russia, are big enough to shatter windows and crumble walls. Others, like the one that caused the Tunguska Event of 1908, can flatten entire cities. A handful can trigger global extinctions, like the asteroid that smashed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago.

But how big of an asteroid does it take to damage cities, states, countries, and the planet?

On the fourth-annual World Asteroid Day (Saturday, June 30), we take a look at estimates from NASA, Purdue University's "Impact Earth" simulator, and other sources.

Images in this story come from a previously published video.

SEE ALSO: 8 truly horrifying ways the Earth could die

DON'T MISS: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old who defeated a powerful House Democrat, has an asteroid named after her — here's why

Most of us go through life without thinking much about rocks from space. But even a small — and relatively frequent — asteroid can inflict great damage.

By numbers, most meteors are smaller than a car and burn up in the atmosphere as harmless meteors.

Any larger than that, and things start getting risky.

Why are meteor showers like the Perseids so common? Turns out, space isn’t as empty as you might think. It’s littered with debris that forms those spectacular meteor shower we look forward to each year. Following is a transcript of the video.

Solar eclipses are rare and you can never predict when an aurora will illuminate the sky. But there's one cosmic light show we can always count on. Meteor showers. They happen around the same time each year and have been doing so for centuries. But despite their brilliance and beauty it doesn't take much to make a meteor shower. You just need three ingredients, the sun, Earth and a comet.

Comets have been around since the dawn of our solar system over four-and-a-half billion years ago. They formed out of the same disc of gas and dust that created earth and the other seven planets. And like the other planets they too orbit the sun but that's where the similarities end. Most planets orbit the sun on fairly circular orbits whereas comets take a more elliptical path through our solar system. Check out Halley's Comet for example. Right now it's beyond the orbit of the furthest planet Neptune. But over the next 50 years it will travel about three billion miles toward the inner reaches of our solar system. Eventually flying past Earth in the year 2061.

And it's encounters like this that make meteor showers possible. Because as a comet approaches the inner solar system, the sun's radiation heats up ice under the surface and as that ice turns to a vapor it generates powerful outbursts of gas and dust, sometimes ejecting hundreds of tons of material into space per second. The result is a brilliant stream of debris called the comet tail or coma, which can stretch hundreds to thousands of miles across. In fact, space is littered with comet tail debris that our planet passes through each year. And when that happens, the debris strikes our atmosphere at over 100,000 miles an hour, incinerating the four-and-a-half billion year old fragments in seconds. This produces brilliant flashes of light that we call a meteor shower.

Now some meteor showers are more spectacular than others, giving us anywhere from a few to over a hundred meteors an hour. And even the same meteor shower can vary from year to year. It all depends on how much debris we scoop up as we pass through the tail. Regardless, comet tails tend to follow the same path as the comet itself, which means they pass through the same spot along Earth's orbit. That's why we get the same meteor showers around the same time each year. At the end of October for example, we pass through the tale of Halley's Comet which gives us the Orionids meteor shower. And every August, we pass through comet Swift-Tuttle's tail which we see as the Perseids meteor shower. But it's not just October and August, meteor showers occur year-round. So check your calendar to see when the next one will be coming to a sky near you.

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• NASA launched an ion-propelled probe called Dawn toward the asteroid belt in 2007.
• In 2015, Dawn reached Ceres, a Texas-sized dwarf planet that may hide a salty ocean and possibly alien life.
• The spacecraft is almost out of fuel, and its mission may end between mid-September and mid-October.
• Researchers expect Dawn to stay in orbit for 20 to 50 years, but after that it may crash into Ceres.

NASA's only robot exploring the asteroid belt is about to die, the space agency explained during a live event on Friday.

However, the Dawn probe pulled off a last-ditch maneuver this summer that is helping to create surface maps of a dwarf planet — information that may be used to land a future mission on the distant world.

Dawn launched in 2007 and became the first NASA mission to use superefficient ion thrusters. In its yearslong voyage through deep space, the robot ended up in the asteroid belt, the mysterious and expansive zone between Mars and Jupiter. There, it has studied the region's two largest objects: Ceres and Vesta.

Dawn reached Vesta first, in July 2011. Researchers think of Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, as a "time capsule" for planet formation, since it failed to grow into something larger after the solar system's birth.

After a year of exploration at Vesta, Dawn ion-propelled itself toward Ceres, a Texas-sized dwarf planet, where it arrived in March 2015. Ever since then, Dawn has made several major discoveries about the 592-mile-wide ice ball, including an ice volcano, shiny salt deposits, and other features that suggest a giant ocean may hide beneath the world's cratered crust — possibly one that could harbor alien microbes.

NASA has since used up most of Dawn's remaining fuel to slip into an orbit that zooms within 22 miles of Ceres' surface about once a day.

These flybys are about 10 times as close as the International Space Station orbits above Earth and have led to the sharpest, clearest images of the dwarf planet yet.

"This orbit was like putting your glasses on if you don't see very well — all of the sudden, all of this rich detail is popping out,"Carol Raymond, Dawn's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during the press event on Friday. "It will give us some insight as to what's going on with the plumbing system under the surface."

However, these unprecedented images and other data have come with a cost: a death for Dawn before the end of the year.

Why Dawn is now doomed

Using up Dawn's fuel to achieve such a close orbit has essentially stranded the spacecraft at Ceres.

"The current orbit should be stable for 50 years,"Mark Sykes, the director of the Planetary Science Institute and a scientist on the Dawn mission, told Business Insider in an email. "There is no desire to change the orbit — and no juice."

Dawn uses its "juice" to keep itself powered and talking to NASA. So using up the last propellant will forever silence the probe.

"It will struggle for a short time, but it will be impotent,"Marc Rayman, Dawn's mission manager and chief engineer, wrote in a blog post on August 22. "Unable to point its electricity-generating solar panels at the sun or its radio antenna to Earth, the seasoned explorer will go silent and will explore no more. Its expedition will be over."

Rayman said on Friday that Dawn might go silent within a month or so.

"We can't determine that with exquisite accuracy," he told Business Insider during the press event, adding that it was likely to run out of propellant (and stop talking to Earth) "sometime in the middle of this month to the middle of October."

But the team, while sad about the probe's coming demise, is counting its blessings, since the expedition was supposed to last nine years but has been going for nearly 11. Plus, Dawn continues to take high-resolution images of the surface once every 27 hours.

Once the probe runs out of fuel, it won't spiral down and crash into Ceres for at least 20 years. In fact, Rayman said, the team's analysis shows a "greater than 99%" chance that Dawn will stay in its current orbit for half a century, "and most likely longer than that."

NASA wants to bring a sample of Ceres back to Earth

Rayman said the 20-year no-crash minimum was a core requirement of the Dawn mission.

That's because NASA's planetary protection office, which tries to prevent contamination of other worlds by microbes from Earth, thinks two decades should be enough time for the agency to mount another mission to Ceres. A new probe could then look for signs of life without worrying about contamination by any microbes from Earth stuck to Dawn when it crashed.

"Ceres represents a place in the solar system that we're interested in for future astrobiological exploration," Rayman said. "If NASA chooses to mount a follow-on mission to conduct subsequent astrobiological exploration, it's long enough to without being compromised by Dawn."

Jim Green, NASA's chief scientist, said the agency had pulled together working groups to come up with a plan to send a robot to the surface of Ceres, possibly near a vent, where it could probe salts and other materials — and maybe even send samples from the dwarf planet back to Earth.

"We'll work out in the next decade whether one of those missions will indeed be going back to Ceres," Green said on Friday.

The stakes are high as researchers discover more water and organic compounds elsewhere in the solar system — ingredients that may sustain rudimentary forms of alien life.

"We know there is an active geological cycle that's bringing material from deep [inside] up to the surface," Carol Raymond said. "That gives us an opportunity to sample some of Ceres' internal material."

As Dawn continues to rack up high-resolution images of Ceres' surface, the argument for collecting a sample of the dwarf planet may be strengthened.

"The holy grail of any planetary-science mission is a sample return, but it's also very difficult," Raymond said. "With an object like Ceres, you really want to know where to sample."

This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published at 1:27 p.m. ET on September 7, 2018.

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NOW WATCH: 3 horrifying ways the world could end

• In October 2017, astronomers detected a strange, cigar-shaped object passing through our solar system.
• The object, called 'Oumuamua, is a comet from another star system.
• A team of astronomers compared the path of 'Oumuamua through space to the motions of millions of stars to try and figure out where it came from.
• The team found four possible candidate stars for the interstellar comet's home, but they say the search is not over.

After a Hawaiian telescope spotted an object called 'Oumuamua flying through space in October 2017, astronomers realized it was weird.

Very weird.

The object had a cigar-like shape and was 750 feet by 115 feet in size, or roughly as large as a skyscraper. It was dark red in color and moving inexplicably fast. Just in case, one group of astronomers even scanned it for alien radio emissions (yet heard nothing).

Most importantly, 'Oumuamua wasn't circling the sun like a typical space rock. Instead, it had dived between Mercury and the sun, swooped below our home star, and was zooming past Earth on its way out of our solar system.

This showed that 'Oumuamua — whose name means "a messenger from afar, arriving first" in Hawaiian — was actually an interstellar traveler from beyond the solar system.

Astronomers eventually determined 'Oumuamua wasn't an asteroid but instead a "mildly active" comet.

But if it is not from our solar system, then where did it come from?

Using the newest and most precise star map ever created, eight astronomers have located four stars that are candidates for 'Oumuamua's home. Each star's path in relatively recent history matches somewhat closely to the comet's calculated path.

Their study, highlighted Tuesday in a European Space Agency (ESA) press release, was recently accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, a peer-reviewed science publication.

How the team found candidate homes for 'Oumuamua

The research team began its search with an unprecedented map of 1.7 billion stars created by an ESA spacecraft called Gaia. The new map, released in April, is the second major Gaia dataset published by the ESA since the spacecraft launched in December 2013.

The map doesn't just note the position of the stars, though: It also shows where stars are moving through space and how fast.

About 7 million stars in Gaia's database have motion data that is detailed enough to let astronomers precisely "rewind" their positions to millions of years in the past.

By comparing the historic path of 'Oumuamua against these millions of stellar paths, the team discovered four candidates which line up within a few light-years of the comet. One of these star systems may have ejected 'Oumuamua toward Earth, likely via a giant planet early in the system's formation.

All of the candidates are dwarf stars, which means they are small and burn very hot. Two were already named (HD 292249 and HIP 3757) and two others were temporarily named by the team ("home-3" and "home-4").

The closest match to the path of 'Oumuamua was with the dwarf star HIP 3757. The paths of the star and wayward comet came within two light-years of each other some 1 million years or so ago.

So, as of right now, this star may be the best candidate yet for where 'Oumuamua hails from. But astronomers are hardly satisfied with that answer.

Why the search is not over

The researchers behind the new study aren't confident they've found 'Oumuamua's home.

For one, Gaia's latest and most detailed sample of 7 million stars — while vast — is only partial. Some 180 million stars exist closer to Earth than the ones examined by the research team.

"Hence it is [therefore] unlikely that we would find the home system in our study," the authors wrote.

The team also looked for encounters within the past few million years. In reality, 'Oumuamua may have traveled much farther and longer before reaching our solar system — perhaps tens of millions of years or more, the authors said.

In addition, the four stars pinpointed by the search aren't yet known to harbor any planets, let alone worlds large enough to kick 'Oumuamua all the way to Earth.

Finally, the speed of 'Oumuamua is better explained by a two-star (or binary) system, yet none of the four systems described by the study have more than one star in them.

The astronomers behind the work are waiting for Gaia's third star map to be released. Those data should describe the ultra-precise motions of 10 times as many nearby stars as the team looked at for their study — perhaps including the one from which our interstellar visitor originated.

"The search for 'Oumuamua's home continues," the authors said.

SEE ALSO: A stunning new video shows what it's like to fly past a comet tumbling through space

DON'T MISS: 17 'facts' about space and Earth that you thought were true — but have been debunked by science

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NOW WATCH: This strange phenomenon could reclassify former planet Pluto yet again

Greenland is hiding an explosive secret under its thick ice sheet.

In 2015, researchers created a new map of the continent's bedrock, which is normally obscured by thousands of feet of ice. When an international team of scientists studied that map, they found a 16-mile-wide, bowl-like depression — it looked like a giant asteroid impact crater.

The scientists wanted to be sure, though, since this would be the one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth. So they shored up evidence for the claim over the next three years.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the team reports that there is indeed a crater, which was made by a half-mile-wide iron asteroid slamming into Greenland between 12,000 and 3 million years ago.

Here's how the group made this remarkable discovery — and why it should worry us today.

SEE ALSO: How large asteroids must be to destroy a city, state, country, or the planet

DON'T MISS: City-killing asteroids will inevitably strike Earth — but NASA isn't launching this mission to hunt them down

The bedrock maps show that the depression measures about 16 miles across and is under more than 3,000 feet of ice.

If you could lift up the entire city of Paris and drop it into the bowl-shaped feature, it'd fit with room to spare.

The research team, led by Kurt Kjær at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, are calling it the Hiawatha impact crater, since the Hiawatha Glacier covers the depression.

• Small asteroids can strike Earth with the force of many nuclear weapons and destroy entire cities.
• A small fraction of such asteroids is estimated to have been found, but NASA is supposed to find 90% of them by 2020.
• Retired astronaut Rusty Schweickart says a relatively inexpensive space telescope, called the Near-Earth Object Camera, could find these space rocks — and quickly.
• NASA has denied full funding to NEOCam multiple times because the agency's mission selection process is weighted against the telescope.
• NEOCam's supporters say the telescope needs just $40 million more in NASA's budget to launch into space.
• It's up to President Trump and Congress to raise NASA's budget enough to support the mission.

A former NASA astronaut says the agency he used to work for has a duty to protect civilians from killer asteroids, but that it isn't meeting that obligation.

The threat of asteroid strikes might seem as abstract as outer space itself. But the risk, while infrequent, is real — and potentially more deadly than the threat posed by some of the most powerful nuclear weaponsever detonated.

Risk of death from above

In 1908, a space rock estimated to be several hundred feet in diameter screamed into Earth's atmosphere at many thousands of miles per hour, causing the foreign body to explode over the remote Tunguska region of Russia with the force of a thermonuclear weapon. The resulting blast flattened trees over an area nearly twice the size of New York City.

More recently, in 2013, a roughly 70-foot-wide meteorite shot over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The concussive fireball smashed countless windows and sent more than 1,000 people in multiple cities to hospitals, several dozen of them with serious injuries.

We know they're out there

NASA is poignantly aware of such risks — and so are lawmakers.

In 2005 Congress made one of the agency's seven core goals to track down 90% of asteroids 460 feet (140 meters) and larger, which could lead to a worse-than-Tunguska-level event. The deadline for this legally mandated goal is 2020.

So far, however, telescopes on Earth and in space have found less than 1% of these near-Earth objects (NEOs) and NASA will almost certainly fail to hit its deadline.

Practically, this means tens of thousands of NEOs big enough to wipe out a city have yet to be found, according to a June 2018 report published by the White House.

The same report concludes that even with current and planned capabilities, less than half of such space rocks will be located by 2033.

Read more: A 5-billion-ton iron meteorite once slammed into Greenland — and scientists found its Paris-size crater under the ice

We could have the technology to fix the problem

Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, a retired astronaut who flew on the Apollo 9 and Skylab missions, says there is a solution on the wings for this problem: NASA can launch the Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), which is a small infrared observatory, into space.

"It's a critical discovery telescope to protect life on Earth, and it's ready to go," Schweickart told Business Insider at The Economist Space Summit on November 1.

NEOCam's designers have pitched the mission to NASA multiple times. The mission has received several million dollars here and there to continue its development in response to the proposals, but the agency has denied full funding in every instance on account of it not being the best purely science-focused mission.

"For God's sake, fund it as a mainline program. Don't put it in yet another competition with science," Schweickart said. "This is a public safety program."

How NEOCam would hunt for 'city killer' asteroids

Space rocks reflect sunlight.

Telescopes that are looking in the right place at the right time can detect a dot of that light sneaking across the blackness of space. This allows scientists to calculate an NEO's mass, speed, orbit, and the odds that it will eventually smack into Earth.

Small NEOs, though, aren't very bright. This means a telescope has to be big, see a lot of the sky, and use very advanced hardware to pick them up. These monstrous telescopes take a very long time to build and calibrate and are budget-crushingly expensive.

Take the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), for example, which is one of Earth's best current hopes of finding killer asteroids. The project broke ground in 2015 and is expected to cost about half a billion dollars to build. Based on its current construction schedule, it won't be fully operational until late 2021, at the soonest, or able to fulfill the 90% detection goal set by Congress until the mid-2030s.

Read more: How large asteroids must be to destroy a city, state, country, or the planet

LSST, like all ground-based observatories, also comes with two major limitations.

The first: "You can't see asteroids near the sun. You're blinded by the sky,"Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute and a scientist on the NEOCam team, previously told Business Insider. "Right now we have to wait until those pop out in front of us."

Sykes said the second snag is that ground-based telescopes mainly rely on visible light for detection. "If [an asteroid] has a dark surface, it's going to be very hard to see," he said.

NEOCam addresses these two problems by being in space, where Sykes says "you're not blinded by the sky."

The telescope would also use an advanced, high-resolution infrared (IR) camera. Infrared is a longer wavelength of light that's invisible to our eyes, but if a source is strong enough — say, a roaring fire — we can feel invisible light as warmth on our skin.

Asteroids warmed by the sun, radioactive elements, or both will emit infrared light, even when they're too small or dark for ground-based telescopes to see. Which means NEOCam could spot them merely by their heat signatures.

This approach is already proven to work.

The prime example is NASA's eight-year-old Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope, which has found at least 230 NEOs and 49 potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHOs (so named because they come within 4.6 million miles of Earth at some point in their orbits).

However, it's a less powerful telescope, has a smaller field of view, an older camera that requires cryogenic cooling (NEOCam's does not), and wasn't designed just to hunt asteroids. The telescope may end operations in December 2018.

NEOCam is Earth's only hope for quick detection of asteroids

According to a recent study in The Astronomical Journal, neither NEOCam nor LSST alone would ever achieve Congress' 90% detection mandate — only by working together, the research found, could the observatories achieve that goal over a decade.

But NEOCam offers significant upgrades to the situation under LSST.

In its latest pitch to NASA, the NEOCam team proposed to launch in 2021 and find two-thirds of missing objects in the larger-than-460-feet (140 meters) category within four years, or about a decade ahead of LSST's schedule.

Roughly 72% of all NEOs that are 460 feet (140 meters) or larger have not been found, according to a report published by the White House's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in December 2016. This amounts to about 25,000 nearby asteroids and roughly 2,300 hazardous ones.

The NTSC report suggests that an orbiting telescope like NEOCam could help root out asteroids that'd strike with a force somewhere between a Tunguska-type event (occurring about once every 100-200 years) and a Chelyabinsk-type event (occurring about once every 10 years), of which less than 1% have been located.

So if launching a more-capable replacement for NEOWISE is a top priority, why might NASA not fully fund NEOCam for a 2024 launch?

'NASA has a responsibility to do it'

The team behind NEOCam has pitched the mission to NASA three times — in 2006, 2010, and 2015 — and three times NASA has punted on fully funding the mission.

The last instance it was denied full funding, sources told Business Insider the proposal had no major technical weaknesses. Instead, it was a case of trying to jam a square peg into a round bureaucratic hole.

The NASA competition it was a part of, called Discovery, values scientific firsts — not ensuring humanity's safety — and thus did not grant NEOCam nearly $450 million to develop its spacecraft and a rocket with which to launch it. (NASA instead picked two new space missions to explore the solar system: Lucy, a probe that will visit swarms of ancient asteroids lurking near Jupiter, and Psyche, which will orbit the all-metal core of a dead planet.)

For Schweickart's part, he doesn't care about the distinction.

"NASA has a responsibility to do it, and it's not happening," he said. "It needs to be put into the NASA budget both by NASA and by the Congress."

Read more: Trump just signed a law that maps out NASA's long-term future — but a critical element is missing

NEOCam did get $35 million in the 2018 government funding bill to keep itself going, but proponents say this is not enough to get the telescope to a launch pad.

"In the meantime, NEOCam is in a zombie state and all the while Earth waits inevitably in the crosshairs,"Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist and expert on the hazards posed by asteroids at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Business Insider in an email.

Binzel is one of three scientists unaffiliated with NEOCam who wrote a recent op-ed in Space News in support of fully funding the project. They argue it could get done by raising the House of Representatives' proposed budget for NASA planetary defense by another $40 million (up from $160 million to $200 million) and by sharing a rocket ride with a spacecraft called IMAP, which the agency plans to launch in 2024.

By working in coordination with ground-based telescopes, NEOCam could achieve nearly 70% detection in four years, and the agency's target of 90% detection in less than 10 years.

Yet Binzel said the infrequency of asteroid strikes makes it easy to instead fund other initiatives year after year.

"But the consequences of being wrong are irresponsible, especially when the capability to gain the necessary knowledge is easily within our grasp," he said. "We should simply act like responsible adults and 'just do it.' What are we waiting for?"

It's now up to President Trump and Congress

Schweickart acknowledged that NASA's budgeting and culture has, for decades, been focused on pushing top-tier scientific exploration and that deviating from this norm — Congressional mandate or not — isn't easy.

"You're going upstream. You're fighting a pretty strong headwind within NASA," he said, adding that pulling money from science budgets to fund anything is extremely unpopular. "But government agencies are not at liberty to ask for increases in their budget."

Schweickart and fellow retired astronaut Ed Lu tried years ago to end-run around the problem by co-founding the B612 Foundation, which is a nonprofit dedicated to developing NEO-detecting capabilities. But the group tabled its longest-running (and expensive) idea, the Sentinel space telescope, in part to improve NEOCam's chances. On Oct. 29, the organization publicized its strong support for lawmakers fully funding the telescope.

The public appears to be on-board with NASA making asteroid detection projects like NEOCam happen.

In June poll by Pew Research Center, nearly two-thirds of 2,500 American adults surveyed said that asteroid monitoring should be a top priority for NASA. (Only monitoring climate change was higher.)

It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will decide to do with NEOCam in the next NASA budget, and if Congress authorizes that funding.

"That's a February discussion,"Stephen Jurczyk, NASA's associate administrator, told Business Insider at the Economist Space Summit. "All of that's all embargoed until the president releases his budget to Congress."

Jurczyk acknowledged the tension between NASA's duty to locate dangerous asteroids along with internal changes required to make that work happen.

"It is to some extent a cultural issue, where we kind of have this mentality of pure science and pure competition," he said. "I think we're starting to evolve to a more diverse and more balanced approach between pure science and other things that we need to do."

The question is whether those changes will happen before the next Tunguska-type asteroid arrives at Earth. Given enough warning, we might have a chance to fly out to such a space rock and prevent a calamity.

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how much damage an asteroid would cause if it hit Earth

• NASA launched a 1.7-ton probe called OSIRIS-REx toward Asteroid Bennu in September 2016.
• On Monday, the $1 billion mission will catch up to its asteroidtarget and begin an 18-month study of it.
• NASA will eventually use OSIRIS-REx to grab about 2.1 ounces of Bennu and launch that sample back to Earth.
• You can watch live video coverage of OSIRIS-REx's arrival at Asteroid Bennu on NASA TV starting at 11:45 a.m. EST.

After a two-year chase through deep space, a truck-size NASA space probe is about to arrive at its alien target: asteroid Bennu.

NASA's $1 billion OSIRIS-REx spacecraft — short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification-Regolith Explorer — launched on September 8, 2016. The probe's mission is to sample a small handful of dirt from the surface of Bennu, which is an ancient space rock some 1,600 feet in diameter.

If all goes according to plan, the 1.7-ton robot will bring the space agency's first-ever pristine sample of asteroid back to scientists on Earth.

Bennu is thought to be rich with carbon-based molecules, so the tiny sample may help reveal how our solar system formed and gave rise to life on Earth (and perhaps other worlds, like Mars).

Read more: Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.

Yet NASA has a lot of work left to do before trying to bring home a bit of Bennu.

On Monday, OSIRIS-REx will perform a critical maneuver to pull up closer to the asteroid and begin to scan every nook and cranny for the best sampling site.

NASA TV, which you can watch via the YouTube embed at the bottom of this post, began airing an overview of the OSIRIS-REx mission at 11:15 a.m. EST this morning. Live coverage of the rendezvous will begin at 11:45.

A dirty yet pristine space rock

Asteroids are like floating time capsules, since they're made of the same stuff that was present during the birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. The space rocks spawned out of a super-heated cloud of hydrogen, helium, and dust, and formed before the first planets.

Aside from a handful of asteroids that occasionally burn up in a planet's atmosphere or strike its surface, the rocks have floated around in the void of space ever since. 

Some asteroids are rich in water and carbon-based materials, and many astronomers think that when Jupiter formed, its massive gravity flung countless ones like this toward the sun. They rained down on the inner planets and may have carried the ingredients of life to early Earth.

If scientists can capture a pristine piece of an asteroid in space — one that's untarnished by a blazing-hot reentry to Earth and unchanged by our planet's microbe-rich air, soil, and water — they'd get a chance to analyze it and see how strong this hypothesis is.

According to NASA, Bennu (the asteroid formerly known as "1999 RQ36") is one such dirty asteroid in near-Earth orbit, or within about 121 million miles of our planet. (In fact, Bennu is considered potentially hazardous since there is a 1-in-2,700 chance it might hit Earth over the next 200 years. If that happened, it'd release the energy of roughly 1,300 one-megaton thermonuclear weapons.)

Read more: Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA's best chance of defending Earth from 'city killer' asteroids — 'for God's sake, fund it'

After it arrives on Monday, the OSIRIS-REx probe will first map the asteroid in 3D to locate the best sampling sites.

How to taste an asteroid

On July 4, 2020, the probe will scoot up close to Bennu, extend a long robotic arm until it touches the surface, and then shoot out a blast of sterile nitrogen gas.

In the chaos of flying grit, NASA hopes to filter out at least one 2.1-ounce (60-gram) sample of carbon-laced asteroid rock — about a small bag of chips' worth of weight. The dirt would then be stored in a vacuum bag-like sample container.

If NASA gets lucky, the spacecraft is designed to gobble up to 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs) of dust and grit over three attempts.

The maneuver is akin to playing tag in space, NASA explains in a video about the mission, since OSIRIS-REx will bounce off the asteroid's surface right after gathering up each sample.

After it bags some asteroid grit, the probe will begin a long journey back to Earth starting in 2021 and land on September 24, 2023.

Scientists will then spend at least two years testing the samples in hopes of learning what, exactly, the early solar system "tastes" like.

 You can watch NASA's live coverage of today's rendezvous from about 11:45 a.m. through 12:15 p.m. EST.

SEE ALSO: How large an asteroid must be to destroy a city, state, country, or the planet

DON'T MISS: Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA's best chance of defending Earth from 'city killer' asteroids — 'for God's sake, fund it'

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NOW WATCH: NASA's next mission is collecting 'scientific treasure' that could answer one of life's greatest mysteries

• NASA's New Horizons probe, which visited Pluto in 2015, is closing in on a mysterious object called Ultima Thule.
• New Horizons will fly past Ultima Thule, formally known as 2014 MU₆₉, on New Year's Day.
• Ultima Thule will be the most distant object humanity has ever visited (if the flyby goes as planned).
• The nuclear-powered spacecraft will take hundreds photos of the space rock.
• The flyby is "about 10,000 times" more challenging than visiting Pluto, the mission's leader said.

NASA scientists are about to make history by flying a probe past a mysterious, mountain-size rock beyond the orbit of Pluto.

The object is called Ultima Thule (pronounced "tool-ee"), and it's more than 4 billion miles from Earth. If the flyby goes as planned, this will be the most distant object humanity has ever tried to explore.

NASA's nuclear-powered New Horizons spacecraft will attempt the maneuver on New Year's Day, taking hundreds of photos in a highly choreographed, pre-programmed sequence. The space probe will reach its closest point to the space rock — about 2,192 miles— at 12:33 a.m. EST. New Horizons will also turn around to photograph its exit at a speed of about 32,200 mph.

The mission is as surprising as it is ambitious: NASA didn't know Ultima Thule — or 2014 MU₆₉, as it's formally known — existed when New Horizons launched toward Pluto in 2006. There wasn't even a reliable way to detect the object until astronauts plugged an upgraded camera into the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009.

The uncertainty about Ultima Thule makes planetary science researchers like Alan Stern, who leads the New Horizons mission, all the more excited about the flyby.

"If we knew what to expect, we wouldn't be going to Ultima Thule. It's an object we’ve never encountered before," Stern told Business Insider. "This is what what exploration is about."

Here's what to expect from the flyby and how to watch a live broadcast.

What Ultima Thule is and where it's located

New Horizons is coasting through a zone called the Kuiper Belt, a region where sunlight is about as weak as the light from a full moon on Earth. That far away, frozen leftovers of the solar system's formation called Kuiper Belt Objects, or KBOs, lurk in vast numbers. (Pluto is one of them.)

Ultima Thule is one of these pristine remnants. It has presumably remained in its distant and icy orbit for billions of years, and it's also too small to deform under its own heft and erase its early history from humanity's prying eyes.

Studying the object might therefore reveal new clues about how the solar system evolved to form planets like Earth, Stern said.

"Ultima is the first thing we've been to that is not big enough to have a geological engine like a planet, and also something that's never been warmed greatly by the sun," he said. "It's like a time capsule from 4.5 billion years ago. That's what makes it so special."

Stern compared the flyby to an archaeological dig in Egypt.

"It's like the first time someone opened up the pharaoh's tomb and went inside, and you see what the culture was like 1,000 years ago," he said. "Except this is exploring the dawn of the solar system."

Stern considers Ultima Thule to be a "planetesimal" or seed that might have formed a planet if it had acquired enough material.

"It's a building block of larger planets, or a planetary embryo," Stern said. "In that sense, it's like a paleontologist finding the fossilized embryo of a dinosaur. It has a very special value."

Journey into the unknown

New Horizons performed the first-ever visit to Pluto in 2015, and following that successful encounter, NASA added the bonus mission to Ultima Thule.

In June, New Horizons woke up from half a year of hibernation to begin zeroing in on its new target. Mission managers then fired the probe's engine in October to put it on a more precise path to Ultima Thule. Last week, researchers confirmed no moons, debris, or other potentially dangerous objects were floating in the flight path of New Horizons, so they kept the robot on-course for its historic encounter.

Stern said the first images that New Horizons captures will each take two hours to transmit. Then each bit of image data, moving at the speed of light as radio waves, will take about six hours to reach antennas on Earth. Those early photos will be released to the public on January 2.

However, those pictures will be small (as they were for Pluto). It will take months to receive the most detailed, full-resolution images due to the power, antenna, and other physical limitations of the New Horizons spacecraft. The first full-resolution images won't arrive until February, and it could take up to two years for the researchers to get all of the flyby data.

Stern shied away from making any predictions about what the images might show, citing how shocking the first close-up pictures of Pluto were.

"I don't know what we're going to find," he said. "If it's anything as surprising as Pluto, though, it will be wonderful."

Once scientists are finally able to pore over New Horizons' images of Ultima Thule, they will pay close attention to the outward appearance of the rock. Learning whether the surface is relatively smooth or features a mix of pebbles, huge boulders, cliffs, and other features will yield clues about how planets form.

'10,000 times harder than reaching Pluto'

Stern, who recently helped write a book titled "Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto," said Ultima Thule got its name from a Norse phrase that means "beyond the farthest frontiers."

Hubble first definitively photographed Ultima Thule in June 2014, which was about a year before New Horizons visited Pluto.

This upcoming flyby is dramatically more difficult than the Pluto visit, Stern said.

"Rendezvousing with something the size of a large, filthy mountain covered in dirt, a billion miles away from Pluto, and honing in on it is about 10,000 times harder than reaching Pluto," he said. "That's because it's about 10,000 times smaller. The achievement of getting to it is unbelievable."

Pinpointing exactly where Ultima Thule would be in space when New Horizons could fly past it required a "two and a half week odyssey" of telescope observations around the world, mission scientist Simon Porter tweeted over the weekend. To see Ultima Thule block the light of a distant star — a way to confirm the space rock's precise orbit — the researchers had to fly an airplane-based telescope called SOFIA and deploy dozens of telescopes in Argentina.

In a New York Times op-ed published on New Year's Eve, Stern described the encounter as "mind-boggling."

"As you celebrate New Year's Day, cast an eye upward and think for a moment about the amazing things our country and our species can do when we set our minds to it," Stern wrote.

The target of New Horizons' cameras and other instruments won't just be Ultima Thule itself, either.

"We're plastering all of the space around it for moons, rings, and even an atmosphere," Stern said. "If any of those things are there, we'll see them."

Watch live coverage of New Horizons' flyby of Ultima Thule

Anyone interested in watching Ultima Thule flyby events can tune into several live video broadcasts being hosted on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Broadcasts that feature the first images and science results will occur later, on Wednesday and Thursday.

Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physical Laboratory (JHU APL), which manages the New Horizons mission, will host the suite of broadcasts through the lab's YouTube channel.

Additionally, NASA TV and NASA Live will mirror some of the New Horizons coverage, even though the government shutdown— led by President Donald Trump over border-wall funding — has sent many NASA workers home.

The first Ultima Thule broadcast will be a press conference with Stern and other mission scientists on Monday at 2 p.m. EST. Then, at 12:02 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brain May will release a song dedicated to the mission. Video coverage will continue through 12:15 a.m. EST: the moment New Horizons flies past Ultima Thule about 4 billion miles from Earth.

Michael Buckley, a JHU APL spokesperson, said there will be a video feed of the moment scientists learn that the mission succeeded. That live coverage should begin on Tuesday around 9:30 a.m. EST, and the "ok" signal from New Horizons should arrive around 10 a.m. EST. A press conference will follow at 11:30 a.m. EST.

On Wednesday at 2 p.m. EST and Thursday at 2 p.m. EST, JHU APL will host follow-up press conferences to discuss new photos and scientific results.

You can watch the main New Horizons events via the NASA Live video player we've embedded below.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on December 22, 2018.

SEE ALSO: Pluto is hiding a gigantic liquid ocean you would never, ever want to swim in

DON'T MISS: Is it Planet 9 or Planet X? Scientists spar over what to call the solar system's hypothetical missing world

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NOW WATCH: NASA has over 100 images of Pluto — and the footage is breathtaking

• Asteroid impacts on Earth are hidden by erosion, but the moon keeps a pristine record of them.
• Researchers dated 111 larger craters on the moon to reconstruct Earth's impact history over the past 1 billion years.
• The team discovered that larger asteroid strikes were 2.6 times more common in the latter 300 million years of that time period.
• An animation illustrates the impact data with light and sound.

The moon has been hiding a big secret about Earth in plain sight.

Evidence of ancient asteroid strikes is difficult to find on our planet. In fact, fewer than 200 craters are known to science. The commonly understood reason for this has been that Earth quickly erodes, buries, and otherwise hides even major impact sites.

The moon, however, acts like a time capsule because it has no air, water, or active geology, so its craters don't vanish. And it happens to be right next door to our planet, which means that whatever happened to the moon reflects what also happened to Earth.

So a new study published this week in the journal Science took a close look at the biggest lunar craters. By counting and dating such impact sites, the researchers suggest, an approximate history of asteroid strikes on Earth can be reconstructed.

"The moon is like a time capsule, helping us understand the Earth,"William Bottke, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a press release about the new research. "We found that the moon shared a similar bombardment history, which meant the answer to Earth's impact rate was staring everyone right in the face."

Erasing early assumptions about Earth's impact history

The team of researchers behind the work studied highly detailed images of the moon and thermal data recorded by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to deduce the ages of the largest craters. When their analysis was complete, they had 111 major impact sites dated across about 1 billion years.

The team's findings suggested that the moon has fewer craters left by big strikes during the oldest 700 million years of that time period, whereas big strikes were about 260% more frequent in the latter third.

This led the researchers to conclude that wind and water on Earth probably didn't hide as many major impact sites as scientists previously thought.

"Earth has fewer older craters on stable terrains not because of erosion, but because the impact rate was lower prior to 290 million years ago," Bottke said in the release.

Read more: How large asteroids must be to destroy a city, state, country, or the planet

Bottke and his colleagues did not suggest that their discoveries mean we should worry about any huge asteroid strikes coming soon. Rather, the uptick may have been a temporary surge driven by "the breakup of one or more large asteroids in the inner and/or central main asteroid belt," they wrote.

The work should prove helpful to researchers who are trying to understand the Earth's history and its complex relationship with life.

"Our findings also have implications for the history of life, which is punctuated by extinction events and rapid evolution of new species," Bottke said. "Though the forces driving these events are complicated, asteroid impacts have surely played a role in this ongoing saga."

Watch the past 1 billion years of major lunar asteroid strikes

The researchers at Southwest Research Institute gave 1.3 billion years' worth of lunar impact data to animators at System Sounds, who compressed that history into two roughly one-minute movies (one of which is not shown here).

The animation above illustrates 111 of the moon's larger impact craters as sound and color, and in the order that they occurred. Smaller craters are represented by higher-pitched and quieter sounds, while the biggest are louder and lower-pitched.

In the last third of the video, you'll notice that there's an uptick in lower and louder sounds.

SEE ALSO: 'This is more than just a landing': Why China's mission on the far side of the moon should be a wake-up call for the world

DON'T MISS: The speed of light is torturously slow, and these 3 simple animations by a scientist at NASA prove it

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NOW WATCH: Why the moon turns red during a total lunar eclipse

• A building-size object called 'Oumuamua flew through the inner solar system in late 2017.
• Telescopes observed the mysterious interloper, but scarce data has left questions open about the object's shape, size, and composition.
• A few astronomers wonder whether it could be alien, but 'Oumuamua is most likely a "slightly weird" asteroid, comet, or space rock.
• New space missions are being dreamed up to intercept the next interstellar object that visits our solar system.

In 2016, something roughly the size of a skyscraper emerged from deep space and careened toward the inner solar system.

The mysterious object flew within about 15 million miles of our planet on October 14.

But it wasn't until four days later that humanity finally spotted it in telescope data. By then, it was moving away from the sun at a speed of more than 110,000 mph. It took days for astronomers around the globe to point every tool they could in its direction.

Astronomers initially called their unprecedented catch "1I/2017 U1," with "I" standing for interstellar — or from another star system. The object was later dubbed 'Oumuamua, a Hawaiian name that's pronounced "oo moo-uh moo-uh" and means "a messenger from afar, arriving first."

'Oumuamua remains one of the most significant, confounding, and at times contentious astronomical discoveries in recent memory. Little is definitively known about its composition, mass, shape, or dimensions — it may be a 3,300-foot-long cigar, a city-block-size pancake, or something in-between.

"This one's gone forever. We have all the data we're ever going to have about 'Oumuamua,"David Trilling, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University who led Spitzer Space Telescope observations of the object, told Business Insider. "Now it's trying to understand if we can tell a story. Do we know what's going on?"

Read more: Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.

Enough doubt surrounds 'Oumuamua that at least one reputable astronomer and a few of his colleagues continue to speculate about potential alien origins. But nearly all other experts who have studied 'Oumuamua say the aliens hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely.

Here's what we know about 'Oumuamua, why it probably isn't alien, and how astronomers are preparing for another interstellar object to unexpectedly sail through our solar system.

How astronomers found and measured 'Oumuamua

Researchers in 1976 predicted that other star systems were likely ejecting big asteroids and comets and flinging them toward our solar system, suggesting we could perhaps spot some in the future.

But the most recent estimate of how often such interstellar vagabonds would pay us a visit (and be detectable) was "bleak,"according to the authors of a study published just months before 'Oumuamua was discovered. The odds, in fact, were low enough that practically no one was overtly looking for these space objects.

Then on October 19, 2017, Robert Weryk, a postdoctoral student at the University of Hawaii, discovered 'Oumuamua somewhat by accident.

Weryk was perusing a batch of data collected by an observatory called Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) that sits atop a mountain in Maui. The observatory scans the entire sky each night, allowing astronomers to compare fresh data to the previous evening's. Anything that's bright enough to detect and moving will thus stand out.

As Weryk told The Atlantic in November 2017, he initially thought the object was a typical asteroid. But after a glance at the previous evening's data, he realized it was unusual.

"I'd never expected to find something like this," he said.

Calculating the exact path of 'Oumuamua took about a week. The math showed it was an object from beyond — way, way beyond. Its orbit was "unbound" or loop-less, and it was making a checkmark-shaped trip through the solar system. It had entered from above the plane of the solar system, dipped close to and below the sun, and was exiting out the top.

This realization prompted Weryk, fellow astronomer Karen Meech, and others to launch a global effort to observe 'Oumuamua with as many powerful telescopes as possible before it vanished. More astronomers eventually followed suit, though with some delay.

"I was caught off-guard, and I think a lot of astronomers were, too," Trilling said. "It took a while for many of us to think, 'I should go look at it.' The delay was people thinking, 'Naw, it couldn't be from another solar system.'"

Because of this element of surprise, and the fact that world-classobservatories are scheduled months or years ahead, it took a week or more for powerful telescopes to start looking at 'Oumuamua. Hubble didn't observe it until November 2018, then again before the object vanished from sight in January 2018.

No telescope resolved its shape in any discernible detail, though. One observatory was equipped to do so — the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico — but nature had other plans.

"Unfortunately, the Arecibo Observatory missed the opportunity to determine the actual shape of 'Oumuamua due to Hurricane Maria, really bad timing," Abel Méndez, an astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, told Business Insider.

Is it a comet, asteroid, or something else?

The observations that were made suggest 'Oumuamua has a fairly uniform surface, is relatively dark, and has a reddish color (which is not unusual for deep-space objects).

Lacking any detailed photograph of 'Oumuamua, astronomers resorted to studying its brightness as the next-best method to deduce its shape. This is because any side of an object that faces the sun will reflect light; a longer side tends to reflect more light than a shorter side because it has a greater area. Repeating changes in brightness can also betray the rough dimensions and 3D-motion of a space object.

Early calculations suggest 'Oumuamua tumbles about once every eight hours and has a cigar-shape, with a large-to-small-dimension size ratio of roughly ten to one. That is abnormal.

"The most extreme bodies we know of in the solar system are three-to-one," Trilling said.

Another peculiarity is that in January 2018, on its way toward interstellar space, 'Oumuamua deviated from its predicted path by about 25,000 miles.

If 'Oumuamua were a typical comet, this might explain its change of direction: Comets that drift close to the sun warm up, which causes internal gases to evaporate. The shooting jets of these gases can act like small rocket engines, altering the path an object travels and the way it tumbles.

In such cases, the evaporating gases form a tail behind the rock. They can also cause big chunks of a comet to break off. But no tail or break-up of 'Oumuamua was definitively seen.

There was also another surprise from the Spitzer Space Telescope: It did not detect a heat signature. The fact that Spitzer was unable to detect that heat suggests 'Oumuamua is somewhat shinier than a normal object, since less warmth being absorbed means more sunlight is getting bounced away.

Trilling said "shiny" is relative, though —'Oumuamua could be as dark as "dirty slush" in a gutter, and that would be shinier than expected.

"We're not talking about a ball of tin foil flying through space," he said.

However, an extraordinary possibility — an unnatural object — did occur to some researchers, a few of whom chose to test the idea against the limited observations.

Why it's probably not aliens — just a 'slightly weird' rock

Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University's astronomy department, took the peculiarities of 'Oumuamua as reason to pursue the remote possibility that 'Oumuamua might be alien in origin.

In December 2017, Loeb directed Breakthrough Listen (an effort to listen for alien signals that Loeb helps run) to point radio antennas toward 'Oumuamua. No alien communications were detected.

In October 2018, Loeb and a colleague wondered in a study whether the object might have a more extreme pancake-like shape. Based on mathematical analysis, they suggested it could perhaps be as thin as a sail that could be pushed by light (also called a lightsail), which might also explain the 0.1% change in direction found by Hubble.

Read more: A startup is developing a 100-gigawatt laser to propel a probe to another star system. That may be powerful enough to 'ignite an entire city.'

Most recently, Loeb and an undergraduate student published a brief study suggesting 'Oumuamua might actually have a 50-to-1 size ratio if it's cigar-shaped, or a 20-to-1 ratio if it's more of a pancake.

Loeb defends his pursuit of the idea as a valid scientific argument, given the data available. In a blog post at Scientific American, he wrote that humans spotting alien technology "might resemble an imaginary encounter of ancient cave people with a modern cell phone," at first interpreting it as "shiny rock" and not a "communication device."

However, Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory, told Business Insider that Loeb's latest paper is based on a misunderstanding of brightness data from a study that Hainaut co-authored. Hainaut added that Loeb's conclusions "collapse" when the uncertainty of the data is taken into account. Loeb and a co-author disputed this, claiming the uncertainty is not as great as Hainaut said.

Many researchers interviewed by Business Insider also noted that because the observations of 'Oumuamua were relatively distant, limited, and filled with gaps, there's not nearly enough data to reasonably make extraordinary claims (which, as Carl Sagan once quipped, require extraordinary evidence).

Hainaut thinks the object is most likely a "slightly weird" space rock, as does Trilling.

"All of the evidence is consistent with a rock," Trilling said. "We've never seen an alien spaceship — we have no idea what that evidence would look like. So I think it's just a rock."

Trilling said he accepts the possibility, however remote, that Loeb and his colleagues' "extreme" ideas could eventually be borne out.

"I don't have any direct evidence that says it has to be a rock and it cannot an alien spacecraft," he said. "The only way to do that is to go visit it."

But for now, Trilling explained that it's most logical to side with hundreds of years of astronomical research.

How to catch the next 'Oumuamua

Since 'Oumuamua, astronomers have made adjustments at major observatories to allow for more rapid-turnaround observations of the next rare interstellar object that comes to town.

"With this one, we were taken fairly by surprise," Hainaut said, adding for the next one: "We are ready."

The research community has also reconsidered how often things like 'Oumuamua might visit the solar system. Trilling and others published a study suggesting that current observatories may see an interstellar interloper about once every five years. By the mid-2020s — after new telescopes come online that are designed to look for Earth-threatening asteroids— they might be spotted at a rate of once per year.

This, in turn, has led multiple groups of researchers to wonder if a small spacecraft could be readied to chase down another interstellar visitor like 'Oumuamua and study it up-close. Hainaut is part of one of the groups researching that idea.

"We had a workshop on this in October, and at the beginning of the workshop we said, 'This is impossible.' But after one week of hard work, we realized it's not impossible anymore, it's just difficult," Hainaut said. "Impossible? That's a problem. Difficult? As a first approximation, that just means expensive."

There's also a chance that, decades from now, a project called Breakthrough Starshot that Loeb is part of might resolve the question of what 'Oumuamua is and is not.

Starshot aims to propel tiny spacecraft to another star system with powerful lasers, perhaps at around 20% the speed of light. Such robots could also hypothetically be sent to catch up to 'Oumuamua in deep space.

"The Breakthrough Starshot is extremely interesting. The problem is that the laser technology that is required is far from being ready," Hainaut said. "I hope it will be one day."

This story has been updated.

SEE ALSO: Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.

DON'T MISS: An alien hunter explains why extraterrestrial visitors are unlikely — despite the US government's UFO evidence

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NOW WATCH: Astronomers have discovered a bizarre-looking object that came from outside our solar system

• Sirius, a system of two stars — Sirius A and Sirius B — is the brightest object we can see from Earth.
• However, an asteroid called (4388) Jürgenstock will briefly pass in front of Sirius on Monday night.
• Sirius will almost entirely fade for a few tenths of a second as the 3.1-mile-wide asteroid flies by.
• The occultation, as it's called, should be visible in parts of Mexico, six US states, and Canada.

Sirius, a double-star system and the brightest object in the night sky, will briefly blink out of existence for parts of Earth on Monday evening.

In an event called an occultation — when one object in space blocks the light of another behind it — a small asteroid known as (4388) Jürgenstock will slip in front of the star for a fraction of a second and, like an eclipse, cause it to briefly dim or even disappear.

"This unusual occultation of the brightest star in the night sky will occur around 10:30 p.m. MST on Monday evening, February 18," according to a post by Bill Merline from the Southwest Research Institute and David Dunham from KinetX Aerospace, which was published on the astronomer-run website Occultation Pages. 

Here's where you can see asteroid Jürgenstock's occultation of Sirius, and how your watching the event could actually help astronomers.

Where and at what time to see Sirius blink out

To understand where and when the occultation will be visible, it's helpful to think of a moving ball blocking a lightbulb, which would draw a moving shadow across a wall.

Another appropriate comparison is a solar eclipse, when the moon blocks the light of the sun.

Read more: NASA recorded the International Space Station flying in front of the solar eclipse

In the same way, Jürgenstock — a 3.1-mile-wide asteroid — will fly in front of Sirius and block some of its light. That will make a small, fuzzy shadow across Earth over the course of 21 minutes. 

That shadow of occultation, which we first learned about from Sky & Telescope, will begin in Antarctica, swing around the southern continent, then head north across the Southern Ocean and Pacific Ocean.

After Antarctica, the first land site to see the occultation should be the southern tip of Baja California in Mexico, at around 10:28 p.m. MST.

Next up will be the US cities of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Those southern locations will have a shot at viewing the event around 10:30 p.m. MST.

Then, around 10:31 p.m. MST (11:31 p.m. CST), Denver, Colorado, and parts of western Nebraska will get a chance to see it.

A series of maps created by Merline and Dunham shows exactly where stargazers can try to see the event, weather permitting. The map below shows the general path and timing of visibility in Central America and North America.

The astronomers note that their predictions, while precise, aren't perfect. Sirius is too bright for spacecraft to determine its exact motion through and position in space, so the map shows a range of probable visibility stretching about 130 miles wide. Even at the central line, there is only a 7% chance of seeing a full Sirus-dimming occultation.

"If you are the lucky one to have the path go over your location, the star will fade over a period of several tenths of a second, probably will not disappear completely, and then will recover its full brightness over another several tenths of a second," the astronomers wrote. "But it could be a shallow drop in brightness lasting perhaps only half a second, if you are near the edge of the path."

If you plan to try to see the occultation, Merline and Dunham recommend reading up on the basics of how to view such an event at the International Occultation Timing Association.

For their part, Merline and Dunham plan to head to Las Cruces for a first US-based glimpse — and they are asking for anyone and everyone's help in seeing the event.

"If the occultation is actually observed, that could be valuable, to pin down Sirius's position to much better accuracy than we currently know it," they said.

If you are willing to help, read the astronomers' full instructions in their post about the occultation.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on February 15, 2019.

SEE ALSO: 'For God's sake, fund it': Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA's best chance of defending Earth from 'city killer' asteroids

DON'T MISS: A startup is developing a 100-gigawatt laser to propel a probe to another star system. That may be powerful enough to 'ignite an entire city.'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 3 horrifying ways the world could end

• The NASA spacecraft analyzing the asteroid Bennu has observed it shooting out plumes of dust that surround it in a dusty haze.
• In the months that OSIRIS-REx has been studying Bennu, the spacecraft has observed this ejecta no fewer than 11 times.
• These plumes, which we've never seen in an asteroid before, suggest our understanding of space rocks may be pretty poor.

A shock discovery is in from Bennu. The NASA spacecraft analyzing the asteroid has observed it shooting out plumes of dust that surround it in a dusty haze — a phenomenon we've never seen in an asteroid before.

In the months that OSIRIS-REx has been studying Bennu, the spacecraft has observed this ejecta no fewer than 11 times. Since we've never seen such a thing, it suggests our understanding of asteroids may be pretty poor.

"The discovery of plumes is one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,"said principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.

OSIRIS-REx has been making observations of Bennu since December last year, when it parked itself in orbit around the asteroid. Its aim is to study the rock to learn about the early Solar System, since it's thought Bennu formed at that time.

And, ambitiously, the craft is going to be taking a sample from the asteroid with a robotic arm, with intention to bring it back to Earth.

So far, the plumes have not been officially included among findings already published about Bennu, which are detailed in a series of papers out this week in Nature Astronomy.

Scientists discovered the first plume on 6 January, and the team then kept a careful watch for further activity. Over the following two months, they observed the plumes a few more times, and kept track of the particles of dust therein.

Some of the dust got blown out to space; other particles were recaptured in Bennu's orbit, most of them falling back down to the asteroid's surface. At least four chunks, however, stayed in Bennu orbit — perhaps on their way to becoming miniature asteroid moons.

The plumes don't pose a risk to OSIRIS-REx — but that's about all we know about them (aside from the indication that maybe asteroids are much more active than we thought). The OSIRIS-REx team is trying to find out more — where they come from, and what triggers them.

"We have had spacecraft around other asteroids, and nothing like this was ever reported," planetary astronomer Andrew Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland told New Scientist. "The question is, why is this asteroid different?"

Read more:NASA analysed a photo taken by the Hubble Telescope so we can hear what space 'sounds like'

We've seen plumes before, but Bennu's activity may not bear similarities to the plumes ESA spacecraft Rosetta observed on Comet 67P. Those ones were dusty, but astronomers think they may have been caused by volatile ices sublimating in cavities beneath the comet's surface, causing the cavities to collapse and spew the dust outwards.

Meanwhile, asteroids do not contain ice; in fact, it's one of the big differences between comets and asteroids. It's not impossible that Bennu contains ice under its surface, although its orbital position is too warm for it to have formed there. The only way it could contain ice is if it formed farther out in the Solar System, and somehow made its way closer in.

Among other discoveries, scientists at the Southwest Research Institute found minerals similar to meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, which are known to be rich in volatiles and show evidence of interactions with water or ice.

That could mean that ice was plentiful in the planetary disc during the time in Solar System's formation when Bennu came into being.

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The sample OSIRIS-REx is due to collect could reveal more — but it's proving a bit harder to grab than initially thought. That's because Bennu's surface is covered with chunky boulders, which present hazards for sample collection.

The science team has therefore had to adjust the parameters of the sample collection site — and adjust their approach. A smaller sample site means OSIRIS-REx's descent will have to be more accurate.

It also means the team can rework the surface model that predicted Bennu would be relatively boulder-free with new data that will hopefully lead to more accurate future modeling.

"The first three months of OSIRIS-REx's up-close investigation of Bennu have reminded us what discovery is all about — surprises, quick thinking, and flexibility,"said planetary scientist Lori Glaze of NASA.

Findings about the asteroid have been detailed in a special issue of Nature Astronomy.

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